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Sunday, February 15, 2015

I have a hammer. I don’t use my hammer to scramble eggs. That doesn’t mean my hammer is useless.

Colleagues sometimes agree to disagree. That happened this earlier this week, when Mike Petriello and I had a brief back-and-forth on Twitter. Referring to a Jeff Sullivan piece on Ben Revere, Mike called outfield assists “a hilariously useless stat.”

I responded that no stat is useless when taken into context. Delving into “Kill the win” territory, I said I’d rather know Denny McLain won ...

Good thing Daniel Okrent never dined at the Le Bretôn Française restaurant.

With the newsstand costs rising to $7.99, of course, most of the preseason periodicals truly are no longer worth the paper they were printed on. Yet, their popularity persists, because with the rise of fantasy baseball has come a surge of championing preseason projections, the fair-haired child of the game’s shotgun analytics marriage.

Spare me the emails. I enjoy baseball’s new math, and even agree with most of ...

“There’s a few questions, but more about what specific role they’re going to play,” Luhnow said. “What role Evan Gattis is going to play, what role Chris Carter is going to play, those are two fundamental questions we need to answer because there’s only one DH position. So that’s a big piece for us.

I liked the Semien comment. A lot of people don’t think Semien has the chops to handle shortstop on a regular basis. When you look at it from this perspective, though, it doesn’t seem to be a stretch to have him stay there.

Man, so many changes to this roster in such a short time. But attention to detail on defense is a constant. Brett Lawrie, if healthy (that’s always the “if” with Lawrie), is a major defensive asset at the hot corner. Ben Zobrist can handle seemingly every position on the ...

Delmonico, 22, is still under a 50-game suspension for testing positive for an amphetamine late last July. Baseball America reported he has been signed by the Chicago White Sox.

Delmonico was acquired from Baltimore in exchange for reliever Francisco Rodriguez in late July 2013 and immediately was listed among the Brewers’ top prospects. The organization had a void at that position and it was hoped he would rise through the system and fulfill his potential.

A bunch of 12-year-old kids had their hearts broken this week. Jackie Robinson West, a team from Chicago’s South Side, won the U.S. title at the 2014 Little League World Series. They achieved their dream in dramatic fashion. I remember watching their pitcher give up the go-ahead homer against Nevada in the title game and he was so crushed that he physically doubled-over on the mound. His team fought back and won in an amazing game, and the joy on that kid’s face after the final out was ...

Ernie Banks, the beloved Cubs great who once said he wanted to have his ashes scattered at Wrigley Field, is at the center of a battle over his remains, as his estranged wife has gone to court to prevent a longtime friend of “Mr. Cub” from having his remains cremated. . . . According to court records, Elizabeth Banks filed a petition to prevent a woman who describes herself in the documents as a longtime friend of Ernie Banks, his caretaker and the ...

Does the new column mean Howard’s no longer in the running for the NBC Nightly News gig?

Welcome to Capital’s new Sports Business Report, a weekly digest of news on the top players and institutions in one of New York’s highest-profile industries. ...

Here are the numbers you have to actually remember, and what keeps Fred Wilpon and his partners up nights (and Wilmer Flores entrenched as a low-cost shortstop). The Mets’ parent company, Sterling Equities, continues to finance the $250 million ...

Some touching stuff on baseball’s first female beat writer. Good quotes from Lloyd Moseby, and you get a hint of what she went through in the early 80s. RIP

It was in the late 1970s that female sportswriters began to push back against their long held prohibition from men’s locker rooms. After Sports Illustrated reporter Melissa Ludtke was barred from the New York Yankees’ clubhouse during the 1977 World Series, she filed a discrimination lawsuit against Major League Baseball. She won the ...

[University of Michigan pitcher] George Sisler, southpaw extraordinary until he strained his arm last spring, dug up a mitt, tossed a few balls and joyously informed his college mates that his offside wing was as good as ever. If Coach Lundgren agrees with him, that means that George will bear the brunt of the mound work this spring.

Concern around baseball about the strike zone filtered down to the MLB’s Playing Rules Committee, which must formally adopt a rules change before it’s implemented. The committee will pay close attention to the size of the strike zone in 2015 with an eye on change as early as 2016 after studies showed it has expanded significantly since 2009, coinciding with a precipitous dip in run scoring. Of particular concern, sources ...

A 6-foot-2, 220-pounder with a rare blend of strength and speed, he was the youngest of four brothers to star at Grant Union High. The eldest, Syd’Quan, was drafted by the Denver Broncos in 2010, but would always tell people, “Wait until you see Shaq. He’s better than all of us.” Shaq became the country’s top-rated safety, turning down Oregon and Cal-Berkeley (Syd’Quan’s alma mater) for Washington; he was the Huskies’ most-prized recruit in more than a decade. He’d go on to ...

Quantifying a catcher’s ability to steal strikes is one of the great sabermetric advances over the last ten years.

But what I have established here is that the effect of a good receiver extends beyond the pitches that batters let go by. A good framer, by changing the probability of a strike at the edge, causes the opposing hitter to modify his own behavior, causing him to swing at pitches a little bit further from the center of the zone. In addition to harming the batter’s chances directly, ...